Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
11: Alien abductions in France
175 Plays7 months ago
In this episode, we delve into the enigmatic realm of UFO abductions, focusing particularly on how they unfold in France. Since the groundbreaking Betty and Barney Hill incident in 1961, the phenomenon of UFO abductions has captured public fascination, although it remains contentious within ufology. We confront two primary challenges: the surreal nature of abduction accounts, often involving inexplicable experiences like missing time, and the reliance on eyewitness testimony, which introduces inherent complexities.
Despite these hurdles, exploring the abduction phenomenon unveils a fascinating psychological landscape. Our guest, Hélène Lansley, a Clinical Psychologist and Ph.D. student at the University of Lorraine, brings valuable insights from her research. Hélène's work involves analysing accounts of UAP and alien abductions, as well as providing support to individuals who report paranormal encounters through her role at CIRCEE (Center for Information, Research, and Consultation on Exceptional Experiences).
Join us as we navigate the intricate terrain of UFO abductions, probing the intersection of extraterrestrial encounters and human psychology.
Get in touch with the show
Twitter/X: @EuropeanUFOs
Instagram: europeanufos
Facebook: European UFOs
Email: [email protected]
Support the podcast to keep it ad-free: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/europeanufos
Links mentioned in this episode
Interpsy, Université de Lorraine: https://interpsy.univ-lorraine.fr/eng/
CIRCEE (Center for Information, Research and Consultation on Exceptional Experiences): https://www.circee.org
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Listener Support
00:00:05
Speaker
you
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello and welcome to European UFOs. I'm your host Sebastian, and if you liked this episode, please leave a review on your chosen platform. It really helps with the algorithm. Also, if you do want to support me in keeping this podcast out free, then please go to buymeacoffee.com. Therefore, less than the price of coffee, you can really help me keep the show up and running at free.
UFOs and Abductions: Public Perception and the Hill Case
00:00:38
Speaker
Today, the notion of UFOs flying in our skies is not too outlandish for most people. Accepting that people get abducted by the occupants of those craft, however, is a different story. Ever since the Betty and Barney Hills story broke in 1965, UFO abductions have become a recurrent but rather problematic part of ufology. In essence, the problem boils down to two factors.
00:01:04
Speaker
First, a lot of UFO abductions defy our sense of reality. People who get abducted not only report missing time, but often claim to have been beamed through walls and moved through space in a way that we just don't understand. Second, much if not all the evidence comes in the form of eyewitness testimony. As we've heard in early episodes, this comes with his own set of problems.
00:01:28
Speaker
Regardless of these caveats, the study of the abduction phenomenon is, to my mind, a worthwhile pursuit, because even if it doesn't provide clear-cut evidence of alien interference in human affairs, it at least points to a very curious psychological phenomenon.
Meet Helen Lansley: Psychologist and UAP Researcher
00:01:45
Speaker
Here, with me to discuss you for abductions from a psychological perspective, is Helen Lansley, a clinical psychologist and a PhD student at the University of Lorain, France, at the Interpsi Laboratory.
00:01:59
Speaker
For her PhD, she is developing an analysis of UAP and alien abductions. Since 2017, she has worked as a counsellor for CRC, which stands for Centre for Information, Research and Consultation on Exceptional Experiences, where she supports people who report having paranormal experiences.
00:02:23
Speaker
As always, I hope you enjoyed this episode and if you do want to get in touch, then please do so. Links are in the description. But for now, sit back, relax and get ready for new insights into the abduction enigma. Hi Helen, how are you doing today?
00:02:43
Speaker
I'm fine, thanks. Thank you so much for having me today, Sebastian. Oh, it's my absolute pleasure.
Exploring Alien Abductions: Helen's Approach
00:02:50
Speaker
Yeah, today we're going to talk about a topic which, to be honest, I've deliberately stayed away from a bit in this podcast due to its often very bizarre nature, namely the topic of alien abductions, UFO abductions, whatever you want to call them.
00:03:12
Speaker
and in your professional capacity as a clinical psychologist. I'm really looking forward today to picking your brains on how you deal with this issue both from a therapeutic point of view but also from a research point of view because you're
00:03:31
Speaker
obviously also doing serious academic work on this in the context of your PhD. So this kind of leads me to my first question, how as a clinical psychologist did you actually get interested in this very complex topic?
Helen's Paranormal Journey: From Sleep Paralysis to Psychology
00:03:50
Speaker
Well, to really understand, I think I have to go back a bit to my teenage years. As a young teenager, like quite a lot of them actually, I was already interested in what globally is called the paranormal. I had a little group of friends with which I could try and call spirits or
00:04:18
Speaker
look a bit at the sky and see if we could find something a bit strange. And then one day I did suffer as a teenager from sleep paralysis. So I don't know if we'll have the occasion to talk about that topic, which is a bit related to exceptional experiences.
00:04:42
Speaker
and at that time i got i got really scared from from those episodes and i was finally helped by my my physician my doctor who explained to me what was happening which is because
00:04:58
Speaker
sleep paralysis is has a biological physiological route nature so then i stopped having that those kinds of episodes and later on i actually started by becoming a horse riding instructor.
00:05:17
Speaker
which I did for a few years and then finally decided that I wanted to use my brain a bit more even though I loved my job and went back to studying psychology.
00:05:32
Speaker
I was lucky enough to be in the University of Nantes in France, in which we, as soon as the first year, we had professors who teach us anomalous psychology. And I also read very interesting books, especially one called Fully et Bara Normale,
00:05:57
Speaker
that you would translate to madness and the paranormal, which was written by Dr. Renaud Evra, who really led me to want to study exceptional experiences, paranormal experiences, and maybe help people who go through these experiences and can be scared or traumatized by them.
00:06:22
Speaker
Then, when I started my master's degree, that's when I went more into the extraterrestrial and UFO studies. And so my two master's degree, little thesis memoir, do you say in English? I don't know. We're already on UFOs, and then I went to abductions for my PhD.
00:06:48
Speaker
Excellent. When you had this terrifying experience with sleep paralysis, so fortunately I've never had this condition, but what I've read about it, it must be absolutely shocking. So in your case, do you remember seeing anything that would be akin to an abduction scenario or was it completely different for you when you had those experiences?
Understanding Sleep Paralysis: A Personal Account
00:07:17
Speaker
Nothing to do with aliens or abductions. I did have hallucinations at the beginning, but nothing to do with alien encounters. And so kind of hallucinations of strange figures kind of moving in your room, something that would go in that direction, or is it really difficult to pinpoint?
00:07:42
Speaker
I actually often had this figured little girl sitting on my chest. That's indeed quite scary. Which was really a bad experience at the time. But as soon as I was able to talk about it to my physician at the time,
00:08:04
Speaker
He explained to me what it was and I kept having sleep paralysis after then, but the hallucination stopped immediately and it's often the case for people who have these type of experiences, which are quite common actually. Indeed, but it's very interesting and I think we're going to talk about it later because for you then I suppose there was this kind of interpretive shift from seeing it as something that
00:08:32
Speaker
ontologically difficult to make sense of a system then to something that can actually be embedded to our framework of reality through that therapeutic approach that you were kind of counseled and then saw, well, interestingly enough, this is probably just a medical condition.
00:08:51
Speaker
But yes, I find that transformation quite interesting because I think the other dimension of it is if you go down the other path is that people don't think there is a therapeutic or a medical kind of condition underlying this, but it's actually a reality that is happening to them. And it's probably quite difficult to differentiate these two interpretations on a personal level.
00:09:18
Speaker
But so then let's zoom forward a bit. So take us through your current work with the abduction
PhD Research and Support at Circe: UFO Narratives
00:09:27
Speaker
phenomenon. You already said that this was a topic then in at university in your master's degree and now also in the context of your PhD research. So what exactly are you, what are you doing or trying to find out? Well,
00:09:45
Speaker
I, on the one part, I am doing research for my PhD that is actually what I call a clinical analysis of narratives and subjects who describe UFO sightings, alien encounters, up to abduction.
00:10:10
Speaker
And on the other hand, I'm also a clinical psychologist for a center called Circe, which is the Center for Information Research and Communication on Exceptional Experiences, in which we have developed a counseling service.
00:10:29
Speaker
in which we offer support or psychotherapy for people who want to talk about their exceptional experiences or sometimes seek help. And do these two areas of your work, under one arm do you work as a clinical psychologist and then as a PhD researcher they inform one another or are they kind of each in their own field and then you do one and then you do the other?
00:10:58
Speaker
No, they're absolutely connected. The institutional framework in which you're embedded, you already mentioned this institution. I'm probably butchering the name, sorry. This then is
00:11:16
Speaker
Just to understand this, this is an academic institution that is devoted to the counselling, but also study of people who have anomalous experiences. Is that a fair summary? Absolutely. The Circe really has the two goals on the one side, the counselling service and on the other side, academic and scientific research on exceptional experiences.
00:11:45
Speaker
And do you have any, because I know that in France the study of UAP is a bit more institutionalized, fortunately, than in other countries. So do you also have touch points with, I think they're called GAPAN, right? Yes.
00:12:04
Speaker
Yes, I've been collaborating with one of my PhD supervisors since 2017 now. So, to get a better understanding, in France we have what we call the Kness.
00:12:21
Speaker
which is the National Centre for Space Studies, in which there is a special unit called the GPO for group of studies and information on unidentified aerospace phenomena.
00:12:36
Speaker
And so they collect all kinds of testimonies. We can talk about testimonies and not narratives in the field of the gépons, of people who directly contact them or who go to the police to report UFO sighting.
00:12:57
Speaker
How many of the individuals that approach you or your colleagues, of all the people who've had anomalous experiences, actually claim to have been abducted by non-human entities?
Abduction and UFO Sightings: Statistical Insights
00:13:16
Speaker
Abductions is really a very small percent. We'd be about three percent of people who contact Circe report abductions. UFO sightings are a bit more common with about five, seven percent of our contacts.
00:13:34
Speaker
Do UFO sightings from the data set you're dealing with also entail other paranormal aspects or is it just that people feel compelled to share this but then just move on with their lives or is something more profound than just seeing a UFO?
00:13:56
Speaker
I think there are a lot of UFO sightings that happen every day. It's quite an interesting among exceptional experiences because unless you're very
00:14:15
Speaker
very well, unless you're an expert in the field of what happens in the sky, I think it's quite easy just to look up and to see something go through and not exactly knowing what it is. You may of course recognize a star, the sun, the moon, maybe a few planets, but well, some things that go through the sky, maybe a satellite or
00:14:40
Speaker
star links and a lot of things that are less common. So some people just see something that is unknown in the sky.
00:14:52
Speaker
can't really say it's an exceptional experience. The interpretation is very important and of course sometimes the sighting is so strange that it is obviously an exceptional experience. I think that's why we have a bit less of UFO sightings than other kinds of exceptional experiences that come to us.
00:15:17
Speaker
Indeed. So someone approaches you with an abduction narrative or let's call it testimony. What does that base on your experience look like for the most part? So is there a typical case without going into specific case studies, but just what is the kind of overall framework of such a narrative?
00:15:47
Speaker
Yeah, well, what's a bit of a paradox is that the thing that almost always repeats itself in abduction narratives is that there are missing times. Missing times is the word that was used by Mack and Fuller to describe the fact that the narrative is not on a continuum
00:16:14
Speaker
But the people have gaps and blackouts during their experience. That's actually why they try to study patients under hypnosis to try and fill in these gaps. So that's still, well, that's common in my experience with abduction experiences.
Common Abduction Narratives: Missing Time and Experiments
00:16:38
Speaker
There is very often
00:16:42
Speaker
the beginning of the experience which starts with a very bright light which is white or blue most of the time that wakes them up in their bed or in their car if they're driving and
00:17:00
Speaker
And then very often, once they are on board the alien spaceship, which they have seen or not, that depends, before the abduction, they often remember being on a cold metal table on which they often undergo very painful medical experiments from the alien beings.
00:17:31
Speaker
So it's interesting to hear this from you who's done really recent research on this because it's very consistent with what you know all the bigger luminaries in the field like Hopkins and John Mack
00:17:49
Speaker
I've already written like some 30 years ago almost or even longer ago and so it's interesting to see this red line kind of going through all these accounts.
00:18:06
Speaker
I'm wondering, from your position as a clinical psychologist, when someone approaches you with a narrative like this, testimony like this, what is your first step? Because I think it's really important for the audience to understand what kind of
00:18:28
Speaker
I don't want to use the word filter criteria at work here, but obviously you need some sort of, I suppose, psychological test ring or buffering system to eliminate, or I don't even know, I don't want to use that word, but what I'm getting at is people who suffer from serious trauma, like sexual abuse and so on, and this might just be a symptom. So I suppose that, from a therapeutic point of view, it doesn't really matter because you want to help people.
00:18:57
Speaker
But I guess if you look at the underlying specificity of the alien abduction phenomenon, it does bear a certain relevance. Namely the question, well, why do these people who have this trauma claim to have been abducted by non-human entities? So to come back to this was a long-winded way of asking you, what do you do with people when they approach you as a standard kind of battery of psychological assessment?
00:19:26
Speaker
Well, the first thing that we like to know is why has the person contacted us? What are they seeking? Some people just want a non-judgmental space where they can just talk about their experience, their abduction experience.
00:19:48
Speaker
And not much else actually, just to be able to talk about it to somebody who's not going to call them crazy or who's not going to be completely overwhelmed or fascinated by the topic. And sometimes they are looking for psychological help, mostly if they have symptoms that approach the ones from PTSD.
00:20:16
Speaker
And then to come back a bit to your question, which was going a bit wide, we do tend to try very rapidly from the start to
00:20:34
Speaker
not offer our help to people who are suffering from psychiatric disorders and mostly psychosis, not because we don't want to and not because we think that people who suffer from psychosis can't have exceptional experiences, of course they can, but if they are in a phase in which they are
00:21:02
Speaker
really suffering from the disorder, we can't help them as much as we would want to and we often try to get them to have a more medical check-up to help them.
00:21:18
Speaker
And in regards to trauma, yes, we can go a bit more onto that topic. There really often is trauma mostly in childhood and sometimes just in the year before the alien abduction. It happens very often, not all the time, but very often.
00:21:45
Speaker
Yeah, perhaps we can get into the trauma issue a bit further on in our discussion, because I think a lot of discussions around alien abductions really hinge on this. I think it's such an important topic, trauma in all of this. But let's get back to when someone approaches you initially, what kind of
00:22:09
Speaker
Is it possible to have a general profile of the individuals who approach you? Are they, I don't know, socioeconomically speaking, middle class? Do they have a certain religious persuasion, et cetera? It can be anybody, really. All age, all genders, and all categories.
00:22:35
Speaker
And how do they rank on, I don't know, standard psychological tests concerning creativity, memory, etc. Is that something you control for? That's actually a very interesting question in my PhD, because for most exceptional experiences, we often meet people who have what we call a fantasy-prone personality.
00:23:03
Speaker
So as you were just mentioning, they have very high score in creativity, imagination, people who have a really good connection with their own emotions, emotional life. They often like being in contact with other people, are very helpful.
00:23:28
Speaker
And in UFO and alien abduction experiences, we don't have as many. And we have found that quite a lot of people with these experiences have very different psychological functioning. And so that is one of my big work, my big pieces of work in my thesis.
00:23:55
Speaker
Oh, that's, that's really fascinating because, um, in preparation of this, I've just been rereading a bit of, um, Susan Clancy stuff from, from earlier on. And, um, I think she, I actually basically expanded on the theory that these are people. I mean, I think she also did some research on it obviously, but that these are people who are very fantasy prone in, um, kind of who get abducted by aliens. So very interesting to see what's going to come out of your research there. Looking forward to that.
00:24:24
Speaker
Yeah, some of the people that I counsel have the particularity of speaking in a very emotionally detached way, at least at the beginning of their experiences. And yeah, so that was very different from the fantasy-prone personalities we are used to.
00:24:45
Speaker
Yeah, so let's do get into this issue of trauma.
Trauma and Abduction Narratives: Psychological Links
00:24:52
Speaker
And I think the way I would like to approach it is the very direct question. So if, let's say the hypothesis is that 90% of all UFO abductions are due to some sort of trauma, let's take the typical one, childhood trauma.
00:25:13
Speaker
How then does one account for the very specificity of abduction experiences? I mean to begin with you said there is this phenomenon of missing time. There is the phenomenon of being subjected to medical experiences on a cold metal-like table. So I
00:25:39
Speaker
Find it i'd be interested to hear how the specific links are created from a very kind of generalized trauma source to this very specific narrative what mechanisms would be at play if one were to support that hypothesis.
00:25:58
Speaker
Well, to try and be clear, well, to understand the emergence of these kind of experiences, we do rely on the hypothesis of the paranormal solution, which was studied by Professor Thomas Haber.
00:26:16
Speaker
And where exceptional experiences are considered as a specific reaction to traumas and negative life events, I do have to underline that it's not the case for all exceptional experiences. It does help to understand a vast majority of them, but not everybody has a trauma before having exceptional experiences.
00:26:45
Speaker
And with that hypothesis, we can understand alien abductions or other kinds of experiences as a non-pathological defense mechanism that allows the person to cope and to keep control over negative and traumatic life events. I have a very good example.
00:27:11
Speaker
I had interviews with a young man in his late 20s who described a very classic abduction experience.
00:27:30
Speaker
with the grey aliens who still come up quite often. So the greys are about, well they can be small but in his particular case they were about five feet nine. Big grey human type aliens with big black eyes.
00:27:52
Speaker
who had him on a cold table and who tried to test him. They made different experiments, mostly on his genital parts.
00:28:11
Speaker
And then he woke up from this abduction. He was back in his bed. And that young man had actually a few days before his abduction been raped by four men.
00:28:30
Speaker
And he hadn't realized and it came up during psychotherapy that one of the men that were in the rape he suffered from had physical features that were exactly the same as one of the alien beings that he had during his abduction encounter.
00:28:56
Speaker
Yes, so I think this is a really good example of the direct relationship. I mean, it couldn't be any better. I mean, obviously, it's horrible what happened to that individual. But I mean, from a scientific point of view, I think there you have a 100% match between the event and the outcome in terms of that alien abduction narrative. But just to get a better understanding of this, so not all
00:29:27
Speaker
individuals who approach you with an alien abduction testimony have traumatic experiences, is that correct? So what's the kind of quantitative relationship between those that where you can clearly say they have a traumatic experience that might account for it, or there are people who where you just can't detect anything? Oh, well, more than 90%. There is a traumatic background.
00:29:58
Speaker
and interesting and it wouldn't be so the thing is what I was wondering you know I'm very undecided on the topic so that's why I haven't really covered it in this in this podcast so far because I don't really know what to make of it but um
00:30:17
Speaker
I mean the um I mean the event itself of being abducted by what or claim or the having the experience of being abducted by something that's totally beyond your understanding already is kind of a traumatic um experience so it's for me it's a bit this
00:30:40
Speaker
Henanek question. So where does the trauma come from? Does it actually come from the alien abduction experience or is that just a symptom, as you said, a coping mechanism according to that model that then kind of mitigates a previous trauma? So is there any analytical way of distinguishing between these two?
00:31:05
Speaker
Because in the case study just gave to me, it almost seems that this wasn't because the time lapse between the two was very short. They were almost identical. But yeah.
00:31:21
Speaker
Yeah, well, that particular case is just a very good example of the model of the paranormal solution. Most of the time, it's much more complicated to be able to create, well, to be able to make a direct link, a direct connection between a traumatic event or traumatic events that occurred during childhood and then an alien abduction.
00:31:51
Speaker
We also in Circe all stand and it's very important to us to have a non-judgmental point of view. As I said, about for 90% of the people that I interview or who undergo
00:32:09
Speaker
psychotherapy with me. Yes, there is a traumatic background. Sometimes we are able with our patients to connect the exceptional experiences to the traumatic experiences to help them psychologically digest them, that's the term we use in clinical psychology, so that they have a better quality of life.
00:32:38
Speaker
But I can't say, I can't today prove that alien abduction exists. And I can't say that they don't. I don't have the proof that nobody has ever been taken aboard an alien ship. I think that's a very good position to adopt. And coming back to Susan Clancy, I think she was a bit jockmatic in her
00:33:08
Speaker
you know, argument that hey, all of this is just, you know, phenomenon of the human psyche. So, so I think that that very refreshing and both from a kind of interpretive point of view, the way you or epistemological point of view, but also, as you said, as a kind of therapeutic necessity, they want to have this position of being undecided, or at least able to kind of non judgmental. So I think that's
00:33:37
Speaker
very important. Another feature that I think 100% pops up in any abduction book is the role of hypnotherapy.
Hypnosis in Abduction Therapy: Risks and Concerns
00:33:51
Speaker
What's your take on that?
00:33:54
Speaker
Well, hypnotherapy or hypnosis still exists in abduction therapy, if I may call it that way. I know that in France there is a group who still uses it.
00:34:12
Speaker
Often, their aim is to do what we call regression hypnosis, to try and put the person back into the vivid memory of the experience so that they can have a full narrative of it.
00:34:35
Speaker
I am not an expert in hypnosis, but I do know that hypnosis cannot work without another people giving clues and helping the person to guide them along the narrative.
00:34:51
Speaker
So I do tend to believe that hypnosis could bring false memories and not really give the real narrative of the experience and kind of just fill in the blanks in the gaps of the missing times. So I don't use hypnosis.
00:35:18
Speaker
think it's the best tool to help the patients or to get the best narratives. We rather use techniques that come from microphenomenology in which we do also try to put the person in a specific state of mind but without
00:35:39
Speaker
changing without putting them under hypnosis or anything like that. But we just try to help them talk about their experiences using the present time. So it helps them go back to the experience and describe it a bit like they would do for a movie or a dream.
00:36:05
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, if you listen to some of the interview tapes, I think a lot of them are online from Bud Hopkins. I mean, it's terrifying, you know, I mean, you know, not that I believe in the ontological reality of it necessarily, but what these people went through by being in under hypnosis is absolutely terrifying. Screaming, crying.
00:36:32
Speaker
So I was wondering if that has to be the best approach that we have in our therapeutic toolkit, because obviously these people are suffering quite a bit.
00:36:46
Speaker
Well, I hope that the therapists who put them under hypnosis do explain that it can be quite traumatic and that they are going to go through the same kind of experience that they have had
00:37:06
Speaker
again and I also hope that they get help afterwards and that they are not just left to go back home after the session.
Cultural Influence on Abduction Narratives
00:37:22
Speaker
How do you make sense of the consistency in the story? So the narrative consistency, because as you initially pointed out, there is a certain narrative flow to this and a buildup, and then the cataclysm of kind of being on the spaceship and subjected to various medical experiments. So I always wondered if this is due to trauma, which
00:37:51
Speaker
As someone who's not skilled or psychologically for me is something very personal with different manifestations How does the narrative consistency emerge different people telling the same thing? What's the source of that? I Think that there's a real impact of the culture and the society Exceptional
00:38:20
Speaker
abductions but we use the term abductions now to speak specifically about aliens but maybe kidnapping or being taken out of your
00:38:35
Speaker
known world to go up in the sky and go to sometimes a different world or a spaceship is something that people have been describing since ancient times, since antiquity we have those. In the Middle Ages people said that they were taken up in the sky by witches.
00:39:01
Speaker
So the experiences have always happened. I think that our Western societies today use the interpretation of alien abductions. Maybe it has always been aliens, I don't know.
00:39:21
Speaker
that the culture does have a very big part of importance in the interpretation of the experience. I think that's a very fair and accurate point. If you look at the Northern European fairy law, it's the same, little people abducting humans and leading them into their
00:39:50
Speaker
arcane world. It's very fascinating stuff and has many resemblances to the UFO phenomenon, especially this element of abduction of being unwillingly taken to a place that exists alongside but also outside our reality.
00:40:10
Speaker
So that's that's very fascinating. What do you make though because this question always comes up and I've heard various theories Obviously it all started with Betty and Barney Hill on their road trip and I think the very common argument is that well Back then there wasn't a lot of media around and in fact not many UFO documentaries films, whatever and
00:40:36
Speaker
So how could they have had this very visceral lively experience of being abducted by aliens, which hitherto had never really been been been a thing in that particular manifestation at least.
Revisiting the Hill Case: Sci-Fi Influences
00:40:56
Speaker
Well, actually for the Hill experience, they did remember afterwards that they had watched a science fiction movie just a few days before being abducted.
00:41:11
Speaker
I think it's a bit easy to just say that they had the abduction because they watched a movie. I don't think that that can happen because, well, they would be much more abductions if just watching a movie could make you have these kind of experiences.
00:41:31
Speaker
I think that at the beginning, the hills, they really had only a big missing time. They didn't understand how it was possible that a car trip that was supposed to be about 30 minutes, if I remember, took more than a couple of hours.
00:41:58
Speaker
And so that's why they started having questions. They had a UFO sighting, but they only remembered the alien abduction and the alien encounter under hypnosis. So there was a bit of reconstruction there, I think. Yeah, absolutely. But I think in terms of what actually may have happened, you know, the abduction
00:42:23
Speaker
It may have happened, it may have not happened, who knows? But I think it's fairly certain to say that they had the experience of missing time because this is something that really occurred to them. And they also saw a weird light in the sky and he got his binoculars out and probably had a good old look at it. So I think this is most likely what happened in our
00:42:49
Speaker
kind of plain of reality, so to speak, but whatever happened after or before then is I think kind of hard to tell. What do you make of the kind of American take on UFO abductions? It seems that
00:43:10
Speaker
And I'm just really interested in this because we're both European. You work on this clinically and academically. And I think in the US, at least from my point of view, I think there was this kind of big focus on this topic in the 70s then in the 90s again with
00:43:33
Speaker
and now it's become this quasi-religious movement almost with experiences, which is an interesting term. They used to be abductees and now they're experiences. What's your take on all of this, on the developments in the US, if you're following them at all?
00:43:51
Speaker
Yes, of course, I have to. The US have an enormous amount of people who claim to have been abducted much more than what we have here in Europe, maybe because they are
00:44:14
Speaker
maybe because it's easier for them to talk about it. They have more groups, therapeutic groups, so maybe they feel a bit more free to talk about it. I think that
00:44:29
Speaker
what UFO researchers called the disclosure has been really important in the last few years with the Pentagon disclosing the few videos of UAP. I use the term UAP here because UFO is so commonly directly linked to aliens
00:44:57
Speaker
whereas UAP is something unknown in the sky, no interpretation behind it, but of course people who believe in aliens and will want to see alien spacecrafts or alien intelligence anyway behind these
00:45:18
Speaker
these UAPs. So I think that in the US people have been maybe a bit more intrigued by what the government might have been hiding to them. And so they are trying to understand what lies behind these experiences.
00:45:46
Speaker
With what's going on in the US, various whistleblowers coming forward or are in line with coming forward, most notably the entire grush drama that unfolded last year.
Impact of Government UFO Disclosures on Research
00:46:02
Speaker
How does that change your work, the work of your colleagues? What impact does it have on the position of undecidability?
00:46:12
Speaker
and neutrality and, you know, when doing your work, does it make you lean more towards a certain conclusion than the other? What's your take? Well, no. Well, firstly, because we are in France and so we don't have as many, well, we don't have yet to really decide
00:46:40
Speaker
if we want to say that there is a reality behind these experiences. And I'm very glad I don't have to choose because I don't want to. I don't have enough facts to conclude. But we do have more and more people who contact us or who contact the Gépons.
00:47:05
Speaker
who are certain of their experiences and of the nature of their experiences since these videos and other documents who have been released in the US. Is there anything which we've talked a little about consistency in these stories? Is there anything that you would say is particularly French
00:47:36
Speaker
Are there typical French abductions? I don't think so. I have read a lot of abduction narratives. I have read a lot of John Mack, even though I don't
00:47:53
Speaker
really agree with his last conclusions at the end of his career. I do think he has an incredible collection of abduction testimonies and narratives and I don't think the French are very different.
00:48:12
Speaker
That's interesting. So the ad might also be because we're living in a very connected and globalized world so that these cultural ideas to a certain degree get traded cross-border. So that does make a lot of sense.
00:48:29
Speaker
What is your outlook on the field? Because I think we need probably, I mean, on your work, because we probably need to put it a bit into perspective there.
Growing Interest in Exceptional Experiences
00:48:40
Speaker
I would hazard the guess that there aren't many psychologists dealing with these sorts of issues, right? So there's probably not, it's not a huge field in psychology. Do you think that's going to change at some point? Or
00:48:55
Speaker
I think it's already changing. Actually, yes, I only know two universities in France, maybe three, who really have a department which is dedicated to the study of exceptional experiences. Circe was founded in
00:49:18
Speaker
2012 and the people contacting us to talk about their exceptional experiences is widely growing and also and more interesting I think we have more and more psychologists
00:49:39
Speaker
or medical doctors who contact us because they want to be trained and to help people because they are meeting patients who talk about exceptional experiences and which what is good is that people are well
00:50:00
Speaker
professionals are stopping to immediately put a psychiatric diagnosis on exceptional experiences and want to help them. So I do think that in the following years we will talk about exceptional experiences more widely and with a more open mind.
00:50:27
Speaker
That's interesting and also good to hear because I think it's been missing for these sorts of individuals who do have
00:50:34
Speaker
As we talked about, very traumatic experiences, but probably don't have anyone to turn to, so that's good to hear. You also just mentioned other medical professionals. Are there other parameters by which these individuals could be studied? I guess what I'm getting at is, apart from the psychological
00:51:01
Speaker
consequences of having these experiences? Do they, is there also physiological traces? I don't want to use the word implant and so on, but is there anything and is there anything into, not to belittle it, but is there anything in terms of bodily functions also on, as far as you know, that's been impacted by this, like heart rate, whatever?
00:51:28
Speaker
Well, I understand why you're hesitant, but you do have to use those terms because those are the ones that are related to the whole UFO field. Yes, we do talk about implants and we do try to work with physicians
00:51:53
Speaker
in which we trust when people say that they have had implants, they feel them or other types of physical changes. I remember, for example, having had one patient who claims to have been tattooed by the aliens and he did have a skin biopsy.
00:52:19
Speaker
in our research. The other one that is often mentioned more by women, of course, is the fact that they thought they were pregnant and the fetus was taken out of their room by aliens. It's a bit more difficult to study, but there have been some cases of
00:52:46
Speaker
of a physician talking about a miscarriage, but without the patient remembering to have lost blood or anything that could make her feel that she had miscarried. All right. With that skin biopsy, were the results conclusive in any direction?
00:53:12
Speaker
Well, the biopsy said that it was ink. It was tattoo ink. So it's just after, well, between me and my patient and how we worked after that, I am sure he wasn't lying when he said that he doesn't remember getting these marks by, well, by his choice.
00:53:43
Speaker
Does it mean that he was tattooed by an alien? I don't know. It was normal tattoo ink. But yeah, we had to work with that. No, it's fascinating, Andy. You had no recollection of...
00:54:01
Speaker
how that may have happened. So it's, I mean, I'm just trying to kind of, from a kind of normal everyday perspective, it's really hard to make sense of these issues because, you know, I just imagine him going into a tattoo parlor, getting a tattoo and then like a week later, like, oh, what's this? But yeah. Yes, well, what's,
00:54:29
Speaker
What's interesting is that I don't think that people contact Circe to scam.
00:54:41
Speaker
Because, well, they have to pay to get psychotherapy. I, of course, can't reveal their case to the media, to television, so they can't get fame from their story.
00:55:03
Speaker
And so I've been working for Circe since 2017. I had one scam, one person who just was trying to make me waste a bit of my time and wanted to do a prank, I think. But the exceptional experience was so...
00:55:24
Speaker
so huge and enormous that it immediately was well debunked. So I really think that, yeah, that person may have gone to a tattoo parlor, maybe in another state of mind, maybe using drugs, maybe just in a kind of dissociation.
00:55:51
Speaker
of the mind went to a tattoo parlor, or maybe there's something much more strange behind these little dots that he has on the skin. Interesting.
Living with Abduction Experiences: Acceptance and Understanding
00:56:02
Speaker
So to wrap this up, Helen, if you were to walk on the street and see someone who was abducted by aliens and you had a conversation with them, you would probably
00:56:19
Speaker
not notice any sort of aberrant behavior, right? These are just novel individuals going about their daily lives, but they have these exceptional experiences. Is that a fair summary of the general population has these sorts of experiences?
00:56:37
Speaker
Absolutely. It can be anybody. Most of the people I talk to have families, work, have friends, hobbies, so it can really be anybody. You wouldn't know if they didn't tell you.
00:56:51
Speaker
Hopefully that is going to change through the good work that you do, because I think we all live in a world that's cruel enough as it is, so we should all be nicer to each other and more accepting. So I think that is very important. Excellent. So where can people find more about your work, the work of the Institute You Workforce, a particular website publication so that we can check out?
00:57:20
Speaker
Absolutely, so we do have an internet site, which is called Circe, so that is C-I-R-C-E-E.org, or O-R-G. For the moment, the website is only in French, so to help you a bit more get info about UAP, you can go to the website of the Gépon,
00:57:49
Speaker
which has made the effort to have an English version where you can find very interesting testimonies, short ones of course and because they do respect the
00:58:07
Speaker
privacy of the people who contact them, but you also have quite a few statistics that can be really interesting. My two PhD supervisors, Professor Thomas Habiron and Dr. Renaud Evra, also have websites and often publish very interesting articles in English about exceptional experiences and abductions.
00:58:37
Speaker
And in English I published last year a chapter in a book called the reliability of UFO witnesses. So you can also find my own work and in that chapter.
00:58:54
Speaker
Perfect, and now the favorite question of any PhD student, when is it done and where can we find it then? You're talking about trying to tell my thesis. And then your thesis, your PhD.
00:59:10
Speaker
My thesis. I hope it will be wrapped by the end of this year, 2024. I hope so. Maybe beginning of 2025 we'll see the important is to have a really good thesis.
00:59:29
Speaker
So I'm taking my time and you'll have to be a bit patient to be able to read it because of the collaboration with the Gépont. I won't be able to really see it as such, but I do hope to write a book afterwards. I think that would be really helpful to have a book from a European perspective on this global phenomenon. Yeah.
00:59:55
Speaker
Thanks a lot, Helen. It was lovely to have you on today. I think it was very refreshing to talk in such a, you know, serious, but also light manner about a topic that was very complex. So thanks a lot. Well, you're welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Bye bye. Thanks.